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The 19th century saw a great expansion of global connectivity and vast increases in productivity. The century didn’t begin in 1800, but at Waterloo in 1815; and it ended in 1914, in Sarajevo. What then followed were three catastrophic decades of destruction, a reckoning for contradictions embedded in 19th century progress. In 1945 a new period of expanded global connectivity and increased productivity began: the “post-War era.”

I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that the post-War era ended in Wuhan late in 2019.

How does it feel, living during a historical moment? The Covid-19 pandemic looks to be the defining moment of the first half of the 21st century. Future historians will study us. How will we, the people of the world, deal with the contradictions embedded in post-War progress?

My son is getting a Ph.D. in ancient history, focusing on the last years of what’s called “Late Antiquity,” meaning when the Roman world fell apart. He has professor who makes the point that around the fifth century people in the western Mediterranean and western Europe grew up in a world that had not changed from a material perspective for a thousand years, but their grandchildren lived in a completely changed world. And not a better one.

Apocalypse is not inevitable. We are not helpless. But history teaches that when unprecedented environmental, economic or social stress coincides with a lack of world order and leadership, calamity happens. Bad luck can be a factor, too. What were the odds that the pandemic that scientists (and popular culture) predicted, would arrive when America had its first president in nearly a century who didn’t care about the rest of the world?

Many civilizations have fallen since Sumerians and Egyptians and other ancient literate peoples began recording history, but if it happens to us, we’ll be the first to have been aware it was happening and why. (This goes for global warming, too.) We have the knowledge, and the resources, to confront epidemiological and environmental crises, but we will we have the will and wisdom?

Will and wisdom. That brings us to the situation in Santa Monica. Our little city, because so much of its economy and wealth is based on globalization (tourism, entertainment, technology), has abruptly felt the impact of the pandemic. When tourism collapsed about two months ago, the city’s tax revenues, of which about 25 percent come from visitors, collapsed.

Social distancing customers outside Bob’s Market this week.

The first impact, once the scope of the disaster became evident, was that City Manager Rick Cole departed. I don’t know whether Cole voluntarily quit or was fired. His departure did remind me, however, that when he took the job five years ago, leaving a Deputy Mayor position in the City of L.A., Cole said he wanted to work in a city where there was enough money to pay for the kind of programs he thought a city government should deliver. Speaking of Santa Monica, he said at the time, “it has the resources to do some incredible things.”

Incredible things. Many Santa Monicans felt the same way. Tuesday evening, I listened to much of the nearly eight-hour City Council meeting, the one where the council voted to cut nearly 500 jobs (about 20 percent of the City’s total) (and including non-permanent positions). Many residents spoke. Most of them politely pleaded to the council not to cut the City programs that they believed were most important.

Like everyone else, I could rank City programs on a scale from essential to “what were they thinking, and why the hell are they paying so much for it?” I won’t go there. Let’s face it, we were all willing to drink from, or have the thirsts of our favorite programs quenched at, the public trough. Nor was it irrational to expect that the water for the trough would continue to flow from tourism. Hotels and restaurants, and stores where tourists shopped, were not, after all, like factories that could be moved to China or Mexico.

The City should have screened Contagion or Outbreak on the Pier every summer.

What I did not hear Tuesday night was anyone (although I’ll admit I didn’t hear everyone who spoke) giving any credit to the tourism industry or the people who work in it for generating the money that once filled that trough. Over the years I’ve heard many disgruntled residents appear at council and commission meetings to complain about tourists. Many of these residents would complain that UNITE HERE, the union that represents hotel workers, had too much influence over City policies. Some of those same residents appeared Tuesday night to plead on behalf of the programs they like.

How about a word of appreciation for those workers? They are now unemployed, and not likely to go back to work for a while. They never made much money, and few could afford to live in Santa Monica, yet it was their labor that underpinned extensive services that benefited the residents of Santa Monica and the city employees who provided the services.

And I know this will be hard for some, but how about a little sympathy for the owners of and investors in the hotels, too? Let’s recall now the many times some council members said that the economy of Santa Monica would always be booming and profitable for (always greedy) investors.

But I don’t want to be tough on residents. Santa Monica voters have rarely turned down a new tax or bond issue. There have been some scrooges (I used to call them right-wing nihilists), but, like Rick Cole, Santa Monica residents for the most part have appreciated a city with the resources to do incredible things, and they have been willing to tax themselves. What many perhaps didn’t realize until now was how much of those resources came not from them, but from somewhere else in the world.

When in the summer of 2017 the Santa Monica City Council, after six years of work, adopted the Downtown Community Plan (DCP), the then architecture critic for the L.A. Times, Christopher Hawthorne, wrote an article about it. Hawthorne, after a conversation with City Manager Rick Cole, expressed guarded optimism that the plan, which Cole and the council had touted as a “housing” plan, would indeed lead to the building of more housing, for all income levels, in downtown Santa Monica.

According to Hawthorne, Cole characterized the DCP as being the result of a “grand bargain” between anti-growth and pro-housing factions in Santa Monica. Because the DCP included streamlined approvals for housing and height and density bonuses for housing development, and eliminated parking minimums, Cole was confident, based on the City’s financial analysis, that developers would build housing despite increased requirements for including affordable housing.

Hawthorne was respectful of Cole’s optimism, but the critic injected a note of skepticism in his article by including a comment from Santa Monica housing activist Jason Islas to the effect that the DCP’s high percentage requirements for affordable housing (maxing out at 30% for the largest projects “on-site,” or 35% “off-site”) would mean that no housing would be built. Islas’ comment on the affordability question was that “30% of zero is zero.”

Now
nearly two years on, and according to a “Downtown Community Plan Monitoring
Report” the City issued March 22, Islas’ predictions have proven more accurate
that City Manager Cole’s. Since adoption of the DCP, six projects have been
proposed under the DCP standards, totaling 335 units, but only 19—only 6%!—are
affordable. How can that be, you say? Isn’t 20% the minimum under the DCP?

No. Twenty percent is the minimum for projects over 39 feet tall (“Tier 2 projects.”) Five of the six DCP projects are Tier 1. Under the City’s rosy financial analysis, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The City’s financial consultants, and a majority of City Council members, predicted developers would build market rate units in Santa Monica even if they had to provide higher percentages of affordable housing than were required anywhere else in the state.

Developers are proposing to build market-rate housing (but not much) under DCP standards, but not with nearly the affordable housing City Council wanted to come with it.

As I said, five of the six DCP projects are Tier 1, which means they only have a five percent affordable requirement. One project is Tier 2, but as the March 22 report points out, the developer of that project opted to build to 50 feet even though the zoning would have allowed a height of 60 feet (meaning an additional floor of apartments). By adding that floor, the developer would have increased the affordable obligation from 20% to 25%, presumably wiping out any profit for the additional density.

It’s not only that developers are not building the denser and more affordable housing that the DCP was supposed to encourage, but the housing being proposed contravenes other goals of the DCP. The five Tier 1 DCP projects are entirely comprised of small (less than 375 square feet) studio units. (These units are referred to in developer applications and staff reports as “single room occupancy” (SRO) units, but don’t confuse them with what “SRO” usually refers to, namely “congregant” housing, with shared bathrooms, kitchens and other facilities often built for residents who need supportive services. The proposed units are small versions of what are variously referred to in real estate listings as “studios,” “singles” or “bachelor” units, with their own bathrooms and cooking facilities.)

The DCP is bizarre, but I suppose typical for the product of political “grand bargains,” in that the its standards penalize the building of what the City professes to want—a mix of unit types and affordability to create a diverse neighborhood downtown—while making it easier to build what the City says it doesn’t want, namely smaller projects with 95% market rate units and only one type of unit.

These Tier 1 projects, some of which have replaced previously-proposed Tier 2 projects, have caused the typical hysteria that is the City’s response to events that are simultaneously unexpected and predictable. Tomorrow night City Council will consider an ordinance to ban the building of projects with only small studio units after having adopted an emergency ordinance to do this in March. (Which, no surprise, caused the developer of the Tier 1 all-studio projects to sue the City, since the developer understandably felt that he had played by the rules.)

The ordinance won’t solve the problem, however, since it won’t stop the building of studios that are larger than 375 square feet. Meaning that developers could still build Tier 1, all studio projects, but with fewer, somewhat larger units. These would still be profitable: according to statistics I read in a recent Lookout article, 435-square-foot studios currently rent for about $2,500 (or more) in Santa Monica. That’s more than $5 per square foot. (Meaning that whatever residents who live comfortably in big houses or securely in rent-controlled apartments say, there’s a market for small apartments. Not only young tech workers, but think of the many international students at SMC.)

What developer needs to build above 39 feet if there is that kind of money to be made, especially if approvals are not discretionary and the affordable housing requirement is minimal? Figure it this way: if you remove all the unprofitable affordable housing from a Tier 2 project, you’re probably left with the same amount of profitable square footage in a Tier 1 project. As Islas said, 30% of zero is zero.

The
ordinance being proposed is a typical example of a whack-a-mole planning. You
don’t like all-studio projects? Ban them: whack! But the problem is not that
developers have found a work-around to the City’s Byzantine and onerous
requirements under the DCP, but the DCP itself, which the City based on wishful
thinking and a financial analysis that developers warned the City was flawed.

The fact that the DCP turns out not to be the housing plan the City touted is borne out by a lot of good news about housing in Santa Monica. Anyone who gets around town these days can see that a lot of apartments are under construction.

New apartments under construction on Lincoln Boulevard

According to a March 26 staff report on the City’s Affordable Housing Production Program, in the four years ending 2018 1001 units were constructed, of which 40% (402) are affordable. The 1001 is consistent with the LUCE’s modest goal that 250 units would be built per year, a one-half percentage point annual increase over the city’s approximately 50,000 housing units. Even more encouraging, 759 units were under construction, and 1,384 units had received planning approval. (Keep in mind that these figures are for the entire city, while the DCP only affects downtown.)

These
are the kind of numbers that the City could try to use to justify an exemption
to the “dreaded” SB50 making its way through the legislature. However, none of
this housing is a product of the DCP.

It’s
time to revisit the DCP. But who wants to spend six years doing that?

I haven’t written here for a while. It’s easy for a little hiatus to become a long vacation, especially over the holidays, and especially, if you write a column about local news, when national news is all consuming. Yet given a national election where the electorate divided along the spectrum from urban to rural, has it ever been more evident that “all politics is local?”

Here in Santa Monica the November results are still resonating. The sensitivities of the losers of the election over Measure LV are raw, as evidenced by Tricia Crane, one of the authors of LV. Last week Crane, who is active in both Residocracy and Northeast Neighbors, criticized City Manager Rick Cole for identifying in an email “longtime vocal critics of city government, particularly on the controversial issue of development” as “longtime vocal critics of city government, particularly on the controversial issue of development.”

As reported in the Lookout News, Crane objected to Cole’s characterization of longtime vocal critics as longtime vocal critics because, “As one who believes that democracy depends upon the free exchange of information and ideas, I find the label ‘longtime vocal critics’ to be troubling.” This coming from someone who personally and through her organization has never found it troubling to call anyone who supports building anything in Santa Monica to be, if a politician, corrupt and, if not a politician, a tool of developers.

But wait, there’s more. Crane then told the Lookout that, “Measure LV was supported by 45 percent of Santa Monica voters.” This, as anyone who has studied the election results knows, is false. While LV received the votes of 45% of those voters who voted on the measure, a trouncing in and of itself, about 17% of Santa Monica voters did not vote on LV. As a result, far fewer than 45% of Santa Monica voters supported LV.

The numbers? The total number of ballots cast in Santa Monica in November was 51,662. The number of Yes votes for LV was 19,786. Divide the latter by the former and you get 38.3%. Yes, I know, only the votes cast for or against a measure count when it comes to victory or defeat, but consider the rhetoric that we’ve heard from the anti-development crowd over the years, about how they are the residents, and about how unhappy the residents are. Given that that’s been their mantra, and that’s why they put LV on the ballot, isn’t it their burden to show that that is true? (If you want to review the numbers yourself, click here to access a PDF of all the Santa Monica November results.)

To repeat: only 38.3% of Santa Monica voters supported LV. (By the way, the figures for RIFT in 2008 were about the same.)

About now LV supporters will tell you LV lost because of the money developers spent against it, but go ask the aviation industry whether money wins elections in Santa Monica.

Getting back to the results, there were only two precincts in the city where LV won, but even in those precincts (which are on the eastern edge of the city between Wilshire and Montana) the Yes vote was less than 50% of the total number of ballots cast.

What about self-appointed neighborhood associations that supported LV? They didn’t reflect their residents. Two of the most anti-LV neighborhoods were North of Montana, the home of historically anti-development NOMA and the base for the Santa Monica Coalition for a Livable City (SMCLC), and the neighborhood between Wilshire and Montana west of 20th Street, the home of the WilMont Neighborhood Coalition. LV lost also in Sunset Park.

But the LV numbers tell only half the story. Any measure will get a certain number of votes just for being on the ballot, particularly one that promises to solve traffic congestion. Thirty-eight percent of Santa Monica voters voted for LV, but how many are truly up in arms about development?

We received an answer to that question in November, courtesy of Residocracy’s founder, spec-mansion developer Armen Melkonians. Melkonians ran for City Council on a hard anti-development platform. In past elections most serious candidates running on an anti-development platform (and all of them who have won election) have run with the endorsement of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights (SMRR). Melkonians, however, was an anti-development candidate who ran a strong campaign without a SMRR endorsement. Not only that, but (future write-in candidate) Phil Brock cleared the decks for Melkonians by not filing papers to run for council, and SMRR left an open seat by not endorsing incumbent Terry O’Day.

How did Melkonians do? He received 12,603 votes. Divide that number by 51,662, the total number of voters, and Melkonians’ tally was 24.4%. Meaning that not even a quarter of Santa Monica voters were angry enough about development to pay attention to local politics and then vote for the candidate who channeled that anger.

That doesn’t mean government shouldn’t continue to regulate development. Government regulates lots of businesses and industries. But we shouldn’t let the most extreme “vocal critics” set the agenda and control the debate.

These election results are, by the way, consistent with data from the City’s surveys over the years about the attitudes of residents. Most are happy to live in Santa Monica, and when asked (open-ended and unprompted) to name issues that concern them, only about a third mention traffic (and many fewer mention development).

Yet we have a political class that runs for cover whenever Residocracy or SMCLC say they speak for the residents.

I’ve been mulling over an article I read in the Daily Press a couple of weeks ago. The article was about how the owner of Cars with Class, the classic car dealership in a storefront in the 1100 block of Wilshire, feared that he would have to close his business because the property had sold for $16 million, and he expected his rent would be raised to beyond what he could afford.

There are quite a few businesses I frequent near Cars with Class and I have often walked by and admired the merchandise—beautiful cars. If Grant Woods, the owner, does lose his lease, I’ll be sorry—not only for him, but also because Santa Monica will lose an interesting storefront.

The showroom at Cars with Class

To be honest, though, it’s not worrying about Cars with Class that has kept me thinking about the article. Instead, there is a quote from Mr. Woods at the end of the piece that I found curious. Speaking to the reporter, Mr. Woods connects the possibility of losing his lease to the recent closure of another store in the area, J & T European Gourmet Food. J & T was famous for its Polish sausages and other meats and imported foods, and I often was a customer. I heartily agree with something Mr. Woods said, namely that “there are going to be a lot of people who miss it.”

But then Mr. Woods said something that was, as I said, curious. He said, “That’s the changing demographics we face.”

Changing demographics. Hmmm. What I found curious was, does anyone believe that the demographics of the customers at Cars with Class were the same as those of the customers of J & T? I’ve been in J & T a lot, and I don’t recall too many customers who looked like they were going to cross the street to buy a vintage Corvette or Jaguar.

This isn’t to say that the demographics of Santa Monica aren’t changing. They are. (In fact, the more people try to keep Santa Monica physically the same, the more its demographics change, but that’s a topic for another blog.)

But Mr. Woods’ explanation for why J & T moved and why he might have to move—“changing demographics”—exemplified a typical reaction these days to change no matter how routine. Maybe this has always been the case, but today it seems that everyone wants to explain every “micro” change, such as a business losing its lease, by placing it in the context of big, “macro” changes, like “demographics.” Call it creeping generalization leading to panic.

It’s like Chicken Little has become our national bird.

Businesses go out of business every day. The stretch of Wilshire from Lincoln to say, 17th Street, has dozens of bustling businesses of all kinds. The other businesses in J & T’s old building are still there. Put it another way: shouldn’t we expect that some properties are going to turn over each year?

The building where J & T used to be; in the store third from the left.

There are other examples, too, in Santa Monica these days. Take the use of the Ellis Act to evict rent-controlled tenants. Every year some property owners use the Ellis Act to get out of the apartment-renting business. To some people concerned about gentrification, this has created a crisis. But is that the case?

First, let’s be clear—whether it’s a tenant losing an apartment today or a homeowner being foreclosed upon in 2008, it’s terrible to be displaced. It’s also unfortunate in a place like Santa Monica to lose old housing stock, which is typically in the form of fairly dense apartments, and for it to be replaced by either fewer units or even single-family homes. None of this is good, and we need policies that don’t make evictions easy and that provide evicted tenants with generous assistance with relocation, etc. We also need to build more apartments that displaced tenants can move to.

But in our society, where nearly all housing is privately owned, it’s not realistic that turnover can be stopped entirely. According to the most recent Housing Element of the City’s general plan Santa Monica in 2010 had 39,127 multi-family residential units, most of which were built before 1980. They are an unbelievably valuable housing resource, home to most of Santa Monica’s population, representing generations of investment by thousands of property owners, all of whom have their own financial goals and make their own decisions to achieve them. The tenants of 27,542 apartments are protected by rent control, yes, but most Santa Monica apartments were built with “sticks and stucco.” Is it realistic to believe that none will be replaced over time or in any given year?

Are we in an Ellis crisis? Again, that’s what some people say, but Ellis activity is down, way down. Here’s a graph from the Rent Control Board’s most recent (2015) annual report, showing Ellis activity from 1986 to 2015:

The graph shows that other than the recession years of the mid-’90s, and one year (2010) that reflected the Great Recession, we are at an all-time low in Ellis activity. Fewer than 50 units in each of the past four years, out of nearly 28,000 rent-controlled units, have been removed under Ellis (and almost as many units previously Ellised were returned to rent-controlled status). All this at a time of booming investment in the building of apartments: the only conclusion to draw is that the City’s policies have successfully tamed Ellising (and steered real estate investment to commercial zones), but that, yes, no policy can be 100 percent effective.

This “sky is falling” syndrome has even infected Rick Cole, Santa Monica’s cool and calm City Manager. Recently, after some bad traffic days mostly associated with Pier Concerts and the street grid needing to “learn” to accommodate more pedestrians because of the success of the Expo line (i.e., good things), Mr. Cole wrote a blog about downtown Santa Monica traffic that was like a full-blown panic attack: “Our streets are jammed.” “We finally hit the tipping point.”

Come on. The tipping point to what? At least since the ’50s on big beach days Santa Monica has been jammed.

Ours is the most accessible beach for more people than the population of Pennsylvania. That beach defines who we are, who we have always been, and who we will be forever. I appreciate that City Manager Cole may have wanted to use his blog to list all the creative things the City is doing to deal with transportation, but our beautiful sky is where it’s always been.

When it comes to the Santa Monica Airport (SMO), what a difference a few years, a lot of community action, and a decisive election have made. Four years ago, in the aftermath of losing its battle with the FAA over large jets, the City of Santa Monica was gun shy about the airport. It initiated a “Visioning Process” for the airport that ended up envisioning nearly everything that might happen at SMO except the vision that most residents concerned about the airport wanted: shutting it down.

Fast forward. Two months ago the City Council listed closing SMO as one of the three major priorities for the City. Last week the City took out full-page advertisements and created a website designed to mobilize community action against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the purpose of doing that. Tomorrow night, the council will act on recommendations from staff to start a process to curtail environmental impacts of airport operations until it can be closed.

All of this is in the context of continuing litigation to establish or confirm the City’s right to close all or part of the airport. There are two cases. The City initiated one against the FAA in 2013 to have the courts declare that the City now has the right to close the whole airport. (That litigation is tied up in a procedural appeal in the Ninth Circuit.) Airport interests brought the other case—it’s a FAA administrative proceeding seeking to extend the City’s obligation to operate the airport under a contract with the FAA from 2014 to 2023. (In that case, the FAA was supposed to give its decision months ago, but has for the third time delayed the decision.)

A city government that was not long ago trying to rationalize every problem SMO creates is now throwing every argument and strategy it can at the FAA to close the airport. It’s particularly notable that the City is working in concert with the two U.S. representatives, Ted Lieu and Karen Bass, whose constituents are affected most by the airport; this represents a big change from a few years ago when it was hard to get the local congressional delegation interested.

It is also notable that the City is making environmental arguments against the airport that it had not made before. These arguments, which have been championed for years by Los Angeles resident Martin Rubin and his organization, Concerned Residents against Airport Pollution (C.R.A.A.P.), potentially will allow the City to make an end run around at least the strictest aspects of FAA control.

This environmental argument is mostly what tomorrow night’s hearing is about. Staff is proposing various measures, including moving to require that all fuels sold at the airport be low lead or unleaded for prop planes, or biofuels for jets; requiring that current airport lessees begin mitigation of contamination of premises they have occupied; and moving to have the City take over fuel sales. Finally, staff wants authority to begin developing plans for a cap on total emissions generated by the Airport, something that could ultimately provide overall limits on airport operations.

Of course, the goal is not to operate a cleaner airport, but to close it and build a park. But making the airport operate more cleanly not only has intrinsic benefits, for so long as the airport is operating, but also increases pressure on the aviation businesses there.

All of this is radical change from where the City was not long ago. The sea change began after the 2012 election where nearly all the candidates supported closing the airport, and obviously picked up with the 2014 election when Measure LC won handily, defeating the aviation industry’s Measure D 60% to 40%. Also, one has to credit the hiring of new City Manager Rick Cole, who is taking a much more dynamic approach to the airport and its future than did his predecessor, Rod Gould.

Tomorrow night City Council should adopt all of the staff recommendations, but it should try to go even farther. For one thing, it should have staff report back on the possibility of ending all fuel sales at the airport and what this would mean, both legally and practically. Another thing the Council should do—at least I don’t see why the City can’t do it—is to terminate all leases with flight schools. The numerous flight schools at SMO are responsible for a large proportion of takeoffs and landings, and given the residential areas around the airport, it’s a dangerous place to learn to fly. I haven’t heard of any FAA regulations that require airports to have flight schools.

Without going too deep into the controversy, there is a group of anti-airport activists who believe the City can go much further than what staff proposes—and close the airport now. It’s impossible to imagine how this could be done given that the City is engaged in ongoing litigation over what its rights are, especially given that other parties brought one of the cases against the City. Although in my opinion these activists are correct about what the City has the right to do, when they ask the question, “why are the jets still flying,” it’s as if they never heard the words “contempt of court.” Judges don’t like it when litigants go outside the process.

In law school they teach that there is no right without a remedy. With respect to SMO, the City of Santa Monica is working on establishing and creating its remedies, both in the courts and on the ground.

It has been a few weeks since I’ve written on this blog. I was on vacation: back east for two family events spread out over two weekends. Both events were joyful, but in different ways. The first was joyful prospectively—Memorial Day weekend my niece graduated from Bard College. Everything there was about the future. The event the following weekend was joyful, but retrospectively. It was a celebration in Pittsburgh of the life of my wife’s mother, who died in March. We call these events memorials, because they are about memory and the past, but in this case the memories were of a former future that was very much fulfilled.

Between the weekend events I spent the week in New York City. So, in the span of 10 days my travels took me from small town America (Bard is located on the Hudson River 100 miles north of New York City), to New York, America’s greatest metropolis, and then to Pittsburgh, a midsized former industrial city that’s been remaking itself for a few decades as a center for higher education, research and healthcare.

Here’s a picture of downtown Red Hook, the village near Bard where my niece lived as a student.

Red Hook, New York

And here’s Manhattan, as seen from the new state park on the East River shore in Long Island City, Queens.

Manhattan from Long Island City

Here’s Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, from across the Monongahela River

None of these places look like Santa Monica. Few places do. It’s funny how people here often either express fear or hope that Santa Monica is going to become something it isn’t or change from something it’s never been to something it will never be when it would take an awful lot of change to make Santa Monica something fundamentally different from what it is.

• • •

I may have taken a vacation, but Santa Monica news didn’t. The big news was the hiring of Rick Cole to be Santa Monica’s new city manager. I was surprised and thrilled. The surprise mostly had to do with the apparent unanimity among the City Council members over the choice of Cole, in particular the enthusiasm that emanated from both Mayor Kevin McKown and his immediate predecessor as mayor, Pam O’Connor. The conventional wisdom is that the two of them “couldn’t agree on lunch” (to borrow Abbie Hoffman’s explanation for why the Chicago Seven could never have conspired to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention), yet they both seem more than happy with the hiring of Cole.

But that just goes to show how conventional one’s wisdom, including my own, can be, which brings me to the “thrilled” part. Sure, we might, and McKeown and O’Connor themselves might, focus on dramatic disputes over what are in the big scheme of things small differences, but that doesn’t mean that both of them can’t appreciate the manifest talent and abilities of a Rick Cole.

What’s truly remarkable (but I don’t want to call it surprising) about the decision to hire Cole is that the council members must know that they are getting someone who has ideas, and ideas that go beyond balancing budgets and negotiating contracts. In Santa Monica, city councilmembers usually like to be the idea-generators. It’s a good thing that they are open to someone who has that vision thing.

What are those ideas? I can’t predict what Cole will come up with next, but going back to the ’80s, in Pasadena, Cole was one of those who started imagining what a post-sprawl city could and would look like. He was one of those people who didn’t believe that our civilization was inexorably doomed to take the form of freeways and shopping malls. As it happened, at the time there were people thinking the same way in Santa Monica, and the rejuvenations of the Pasadena and Santa Monica downtowns reset the thinking for the future of Southern California.

At the same time, the council’s decision to hire Cole must have been made easier because his values (and as anyone who was spent even a little time with Cole will tell you, values mean a lot to him) are in sync with those of the council members.

What are those values? Simply put, and I’m basing this upon the work he has done in his career, Rick Cole cares about the well being of people. While this includes what is usually included in phrases like “livability” or “quality of life,” Cole extends his caring to those who don’t necessarily have the luxury of merely worrying about the quality of their lives. Social justice and a helping hand to those who need it have been part of Cole’s agenda wherever he has worked in government.

Along with ideas and values, Cole has a level of experience, as a city councilmember and mayor in Pasadena, as a planner, as a city manager in Azusa and Ventura, and most recently as a deputy major in Los Angeles, that isn’t matched by anyone in municipal government in (at least) Southern California.

Cole believes in the potential of government to solve problems, and it’s not surprising that Governing magazine once named him a public official of the year. This doesn’t mean, however, that Cole believes that government solves problems alone, or from the top down. Wherever Cole has worked, he has been known for not only being a great listener, and for getting members of the public to listen to each other, but also for pushing for small-scale actions that residents and volunteer groups can take themselves.

It’s refreshing to know, or to have confirmed, that the members of the Santa Monica City Council, however they may disagree about one thing or another, can agree on Rick Cole.